Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 5.djvu/166

223 considering that he was not conscious of having ever seen his parent. Mary, in her last prayer in the hall of Fotheringay, while stretched before the block, entreated the favour of God towards her son; which shows that she had not ultimately found proper cause for putting her threat into execution.

In 1588, while the shores of England were threatened with the Spanish armada, James fulfilled, as far as he could, the treaty into which he had entered with Elizabeth, by using his best exertions to suppress the movements of a powerful catholic party among his own subjects, in support of the invasion. In return for this, Elizabeth permitted him to take a wife ; and his choice ultimately fell upon the princess Anne of Denmark, second daughter of the deceased Frederick the second. He was married by proxy in August, 1 589 ; but the princess having been delayed in Norway by a storm, which threatened to detain her for the winter, he gallantly crossed the seas to Upslo, in order to consummate the match. After spending some months at the Danish court, he returned to Scotland in May, 1590; when the reception vouchsafed to the royal pair was fully such as to justify an expression used by James in one of his letters, that "a king with a new married wyfe did not come hame every day."

The king had an illegitimate cousin, Francis, earl of Bothwell, who now for some years embittered his life by a series of plots and assaults for which there is no parallel even in Scottish history. Bothwell had been spared by the king's goodness in 1589, from the result of a sentence for treason, passed on account of his concern in a catholic conspiracy. Soon after James returned from Denmark, it was discovered that he had tampered with professing witches to take away the king's life by necromancy. He at first proposed to stand a trial for this alleged offence, but subsequently found it necessary to make his escape. His former sentence was then permitted to take effect, and he became, in the language of the times, a broken man. Repeatedly, however, did this bold adventurer approach the walls of Edinburgh, and even assail the king in his palace; nor could the limited powers of the sovereign either accomplish his seizure, or frighten him out of the kingdom. He even contrived at one time to regain his place in the king's council, and remained for several months in the enjoyment of all his former honours, till once more expelled by a party of his enemies. The king appears to have purposely been kept in a state of powerlessness by his subjects; even the strength necessary to execute the law upon the paltriest occasions was denied to him; and his clergy took every opportunity of decrying his government, and diminishing the respect of his people, lest, in becoming stronger or more generally reverenced, he should have used his increased force against the liberal interest, and the presbyterian religion. If he could have been depended upon as a thorough adherent of these abstractions, there can be no doubt that his Scottish reign would have been less disgraced by the non-execution of the laws. But then, was his first position under the regents and the protestant nobles of a kind calculated to attach him sincerely to that party? or can it be decidedly affirmed that the zeal of the clergy of those rough and difficult times, was sufficiently tempered with human kindness, to make a young prince prefer their peculiar system to one which addressed him in a more courteous manner, and was more favourable to that regal power, the feebleness of which had hitherto seemed the cause of all his distresses and all his humiliation?

In 1585, while under the control of Arran, he had written a paraphrase and commentary on the Revelation of St John, which, however, was not completed or published for some years after. In 1591, he produced a second volume of verse, entitled "Poetical Exercises;" in the preface to which he informs the reader, as an apology for inaccuracies, that "scarcelie but at stolen moments had